In seven-league boots

“I was a choreographer long before I was a dancer,” Arielle Smith told me when we met to discuss her brief but meteoric career to date. Still just 27, Smith has already won both the prestigious Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance and - in 2021 - the UK National Dance Award for Emerging Artist. Her choreographic career began in a living room in the working-class London suburb of North Camden. “My poor younger sister was subject to being in a lot of my early works,” she explained with a hearty laugh.

Having made her name working with Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures and English National Ballet, this year will see Smith make a new Carmen for San Francisco Ballet, a new Nutcracker for ENB (to be co-choreographed with director, Aaron S. Watkin) as well as new works for London City Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet. And it’s not just the world of ballet that Smith is conquering since she has also choreographed for Opera (Orfeo at Garsington) and has been movement director for several plays. The Stage recently named her as one of the 25 future stars of the UK theatre industry and, in 2022, The Guardian listed her as ‘one to watch’!   

Smith’s father is Cuban, and her mother, British-Irish. They had both worked in the film industry and met at a film festival in Cuba, where Arielle was born, although they settled in the UK before she was old enough to remember Cuban life. Her paternal grandfather, Gilberto Smith Duquesne, popularly known as El Rey Langosta, was a famous chef in Cuba. He cooked for Fidel Castro and Alicia Alonso, to whom he dedicated a dish known as the Coppèlia Lobster. Other celebrities to whom Duquesne dedicated signature dishes included Ernest Hemingway and Brigitte Bardot.

Smith was bought up watching the iconic films of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, and these experiences inspired her breakthrough choreography in Jolly Folly, initially as a film itself (created during Covid lockdown) and then transferring to the London stage as the work for which she won the Olivier Award. “Some of my earliest memories are of watching those silent films. I didn’t see Keaton or Chaplin as actors or comedians, but more as dancers because their performances were so physical.” It was largely these films that inspired those early attempts at choreographing movement on her sister!

Smith didn’t start dance classes herself until aged nine. “I was quite naughty,” she confessed with another laugh. “I just wanted to run around to music, and I didn’t want to be told what to do. I guess that’s why I wanted to become a choreographer!”  But by the age of 11, the germ had taken hold and she won a full scholarship to the Hammond School in Chester (the dancer and choreographer, Paul Lightfoot was an alumni). “I changed a lot during those years because I went to Hammond wanting to be a ballerina but when I left, I wanted nothing to do with ballet. I hated the fact that women in ballet always seem to die of broken hearts.”

At 16, she transferred to the Rambert School in London, which was where Smith reasserted her fascination with choreography. She made a piece in the choreographic workshop every term and was also involved in the National Youth Ballet, which had an annual choreographic programme.   “Being able to create sixteen pieces during my four years as a student was an amazing apprenticeship,” she told me, adding that “most professional choreographers don’t get to make four works per year.” However, her goal was still to become a professional dancer and she had a taste of working within a company, in 2016, when dancing with Rambert at Garsington in Mark Baldwin’s choreography to Joseph Haydn’s The Creation, which later transferred to Sadler’s Wells. But, although she relished the experience, something wasn’t right: “I found myself in that moment of doing what I wanted to do and not loving it,” she told me.

A big moment for Smith was being offered the opportunity to choreograph a large ensemble piece, called Storm, for the Rambert School’s graduation show at The Royal Opera House. Her year group was a fine collection of talented dancers, several of whom have progressed into professional careers (such as Boston Gallacher at NDT, Monique Jonas and Bryony Harrison at New Adventures). In the same year, she made an alternative 20-minute version of Giselle for National Youth Ballet. Vitally, Matthew Bourne was in the audience for that performance and Smith’s lift-off was just about to begin. “I believe in luck,” she said modestly. “I graduated just at the time when the dance industry was looking to support younger women choreographers.”

Bourne’s interest led to Smith being appointed as Associate Choreographer on Romeo & Juliet.  Working with Bourne was both illuminating and tough: “Going into something with such amazing production values when you’re 20 was a catapult to learning the craft. I absorbed a lot from Matt, but he allowed me to do me – he didn’t ask me to fit stylistically into something that he had already done.” Her work on Romeo & Juliet involved an extensive tour over some eighteen months, working intensively with new groups of young dancers in each venue.    

The role with New Adventures ended just prior to the pandemic, and it was also almost the end of a promising career. “I’d loved being part of this big institution and then the reality of being a young choreographer struggling for work caught up with me.” Smith did very little for a year and took a job in retail. “I was earning more money as a shop assistant than from any small gig I got as a choreographer. That was soul-destroying and two weeks before lockdown I had decided to quit. It was really heart-breaking, but I was at total peace with it.”

But her second big break was just around the corner. “I didn’t get to mourn the loss of my career because no-one was doing any work during lockdown and then – out of the blue – Tamara (Rojo) asked me to do a piece for ENB’s Digital Season. I couldn’t believe that she knew I existed,” said Smith. Despite her reservations about making choreography a long-term career and not having worked for a year, she happily plunged in at the deep end to make Jolly Folly alongside work by established choreographers (Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Russell Maliphant, Yuri Possokhov and the ENB’s own Stina Quagebeur).

Inspired by the nostalgia of those silent films from her childhood, Jolly Folly was also a change of direction for Smith. “Up to that point I had done work that was quite miserable - about unrequited love - and it made me want to make people smile.” The lockdown film, made with director Amy Becker-Burnett, was subsequently transferred into the Olivier-award winning stage piece, which was performed at Sadler’s Wells as part of the Reunion programme in May 2021.

Jolly Folly was driven by the Klazz Brothers’ Latin-infused covers of classical music and Smith is a choreographer to whom music always comes first. Her partner, George, is a conductor for musicals and music is a constant in their household. “Good music is such a gift to a choreographer and what is sad about funding cuts is that one of the first things to go are the musicians. One of things I love about ballet is that the orchestras are so large whereas George is lucky to have ten musicians.”  

When we spoke, Smith was about to leave for the final rehearsals for Carmen in San Francisco, which opens on 4 April. This was another Rojo commission and Smith believes that the impetus came from a quote that she gave in an interview to The Guardian, two years’ ago, when she said: ‘In ballet I’d die of a broken heart or wait for a man to save me.’ Rojo didn’t ask Smith to do it at first but sought her opinions on Carmen. “The first thing I thought of was the music,” she remembered, “which is ironic since I’m only using about 5% of Bizet’s score.” She commissioned Arturo O’Farrill to write a new score that has just some reflections of Bizet. “It hits a few beats of the story that we know but I like to think of it as an alternative offering rather than Carmen as it is generally known,” she explained.

Her second big project of 2024 is The Nutcracker, which has been performed by ENB every year since 1950 and although tickets for next Christmas Season were already on sale, when we spoke, Smith will not start in the studio until mid-April. “It will be made in bits to fit in with the schedule,” she explained. Structurally, Smith is choreographing much of act one and some of the act two divertissements whereas Watkin is covering the pointe shoe ballet. “We need to be fully involved in each other’s processes,” she added, before correcting herself, “I’m talking about it as if it has happened and we haven’t made a step, yet!”    

Smith thinks that being a young choreographer has one significant advantage. “Dancers aren’t intimidated by me. There isn’t the fear that dancers must have when they enter a process with a long-established choreographer.” Her choreographic practice is a two-way affair: “a choreographer can’t work without a dancer,” she explained, adding, “I’m not someone who choreographs anything before I’ve entered the studio and with Jolly Folly, I spent five days getting to know the dancers before setting any movement with them. I’m very physical and I don’t choreograph from a chair. A dancer is always going to offer something better than me, and I let that happen.”  She explained that she has images about how she wants to see each scene unfold “…but I have no idea how I’m going to get from A to B until I start working with the dancers.”

Smith believes that a lot of her success is due to her parents’ level-headedness. She tells me that on the day that she was nominated for the Olivier Award her father telephoned her and said, “I’ve looked the other nominees up and you won’t win but it’s a great thing that you have been nominated! Ed Watson is from The Royal Ballet, and he will win!” She continued the anecdote by explaining, “all my life, I’ve been glad that my parents have always been realists. Life is hard and you can be the best and still not achieve your goals.” Smith readily admits having been lucky so far in her short career to date, but her luck is clearly also the dance sector’s good fortune.